Prince of Fools

ELEVEN

“It’s not raining!” I hadn’t noticed at first. My body still huddled as if against the downpour, but on this evening, beside the muddy trail and close enough to our fire to make my clothes steam, there wasn’t a drop of rain to hide from.

“Stars.” Snorri stabbed a finger at the midnight-blue heavens.

“I remember those.” Not long ago I’d been watching them on a hot night, leaning out from Lisa DeVeer’s balcony and lying. “Those there are the lovers,” I had told her. Pointing at some random piece of sky. “Roma and Julit. It takes an expert to spot them.”

“And is it good luck when they shine on us?” Lisa had asked, half-disguising a smile that made me think she might well know more astrology than I’d given her credit for.

“Let’s find out,” I had said, and reached for her. And they did turn out lucky that night. Even so, I suspected myself a victim of Grandmother’s insistence on education for all. It’s hard on a chap when the women he wishes to impress are better schooled than he is. I suspect my cousin Serah could name every constellation in the sky while penning a sonnet.

“I wasn’t captured on the Uulisk slopes,” Snorri said.

I frowned at the stars, trying to make sense of that. “What?”

“What I told your queen would lead her to believe that I had been.”

“Had been what?” I was still trying to see what this had to do with stars.

“I said Broke-Oar sailed up the Uulisk. That they fell upon us there, that the Undoreth were broken, my children scattered. I said he took me to his ship in chains.”

“Yes,” I said, trying to remember any of it. I recalled that the throne room had been stuffy, that my legs ached with standing, that I’d lost a night’s sleep and found a hangover. The details of Snorri’s tale, not so much-except that I had thought he’d been lying the horns off his Viking hat and now he seemed to be telling me that he really had been.

“When the spring comes to the Uulisk it comes in a rush, ready for war!” Snorri said, and he told his story, with the fire crackling at our backs and our eyes upon the innumerable stars. He spun the tale out into the darkness, weaving pictures with his voice, too bright, too vivid to look away from.

• • •

He had woken that morning to the groaning of the ice. For days black water had glimmered at the fjord’s centre. Today, though, today the thaw would come in earnest and with the sun’s first touch, reaching down across the high ridges of Uuliskind, the shore ice groaned in protest.

“Get up! Up you big ox!” And Freja pulled the furs from the cot, letting cold air nip at his flesh. Snorri groaned as the ice had groaned. Some forces of nature cannot be resisted. Outside, the ice grumbled and surrendered to the authority of the spring thaw; inside, a husband gave way before a mother ready to sweep away a whole winter’s worth of filth and to throw the shutters wide. Neither were to be withstood.

Snorri reached for his shirt and breeches, yawning wide enough to crack his jaw. Freja worked around him, twisting aside with practised ease when his hands sought her hips.

“You behave, Snorri ver Snagason.” She started to lift the bedskins and tug out the heather beneath. “There’s those pens want fixing on the Pel slope. Spring’ll have the he-goats nosing around the she-goats.”

“This he-goat wants his she-goat,” Snorri snorted, but he stood and made for the door. Freja was right, as always. The fences wouldn’t keep kids in or wolves out. Not as they stood. Not how the winter had left them. He took his iron-toothed saw from the wall. “Ver Magson will have staves. I’ll promise him a barrel of salted hake.”

“You’ll promise him half a barrel, and check the timber first,” Freja said.

Snorri shrugged and kept his mouth pressed closed on a smile. He took a roll of seal hide, his steel knife, a whetstone. “Where are the children?”

“Karl’s off string-fishing with the Magson boy. Emy went out to look for her peg doll, and Egil”-Freja toed a lump in the bed furs up against the wall-“Egil is still sleeping and needs to wake up!” Her voice rose into a command and the lump shifted, muttering some complaint, a shock of red hair now just visible at the far end of the furs.

Snorri tugged on his boots, took his sheepskin from the hook, patted his battle-axe secured high above the lintel, and pushed open the door. The cold hit him at once, but it lacked its winter bite-this was a wet cold and, soon enough, spring would wrestle it round to mild.

The rocky slope ran from his doorstep past a half dozen other stone-built huts to the Uulisk’s ice-locked shore. The fishing boats slouched in their winter berths, cradled in timber above the worst of the snow. Eight quays led out over the ice, strutting on pine legs, planking warped by too many harsh seasons. The town had been named for them, Eight Quays, back in an age when eight was a number to boast of. Einhaur, six miles seaward, had twenty and more, but Einhaur had been nothing but ice and rock when Snorri’s grandfather’s grandfather had settled the shore at Eight Quays.

A small figure was making its way out along the longest of those quays as Snorri watched.

“Emy!” Snorri’s shout had heads thrusting from doorways, window hides lifting. The little girl almost fell from the long-quay in shock, which had been precisely the threat that had scared the shout out of him in the first place. But she caught herself after jolting forwards and hung to an upright, little fingers clutching the icy timber, white hair falling across her face and reaching for the dark waters a couple of feet below. One slip and the fjord would swallow her, the cold stealing both breath and strength.

Snorri dropped his gear and ran out along the long-quay, sure-footed, stepping where it would bear his weight and losing no time over the choices. He’d run the long-quay all his life.

“Fool girl! You know you’re not to-” Fear made his voice harsh as he fell to his knees and scooped Emy into his arms. He bit back the anger. “You could have fallen, Einmyria!” A child raised to the Undoreth should have more sense, even at five. He held her tight to his chest, still careful not to crush her, his heart hammering. Emy had been a babe at her mother’s breast when Jarl Torsteff led the Undoreth against Hoddof of Iron Tors. At no point in that battle-not charging the shield wall, not wet with Edric ver Magson’s blood, not pinned by stockade timber with two men of Iron Tors approaching-had Snorri known fear such as that which seized him seeing his own child hanging over dark waters.

Snorri held Emy away from him. “What were you doing?” Soft now, almost beseeching.

Emy bit her lip, struggling to hold back the tears filling her eyes-the same cornflower blue as her mother’s. “Peggy’s in the water.”

“Peggy?” Snorri tried to recall a child of that name. He knew all the children by sight, of course, but. . it came to him, a wash of relief erasing any exasperation. “Your doll? You’re out here looking for a peg doll you lost before the snows?”

Emy nodded, still close to tears. “You find her! You find her, Papi.”

“I don’t-She’s lost, Einmyria.”

“You can find her. You can.”

“Some lost things can be found again and some can’t.” He broke off his explanation, seeing in his daughter’s eyes the exact moment that a child first understands there are limits on what her parents can do, rather than just limits on what they choose to do. He knelt before her in a moment’s silence, somewhat less than he had been just seconds before, and Emy a half step closer to the woman she would one day become.

“Come on.” He stood, lifting her. “Back to your mama.” And he walked back, careful now, watching the planks, placing each foot with precision. Carrying Emy up the slope, Snorri echoed with an old pain, the hurt of every parent separated from their child, whether by a sudden slip into deep and hungry water or by slow steps along divergent paths bound for the future.

• • •

They came that night.

Snorri had often said that Freja saved his life. She took from him the rage that had forged his skill with axe and spear, setting in its place new passions. He said she had given him purpose where all he had before was confusion that he hid, as most young men do, behind an illusion of action. Perhaps she saved his life again that night, some dream-murmured warning thinning his sleep.

What woke him, Snorri couldn’t say. He lay in the dark and the warmth of his covers, Freja close enough to touch but not touching. For long moments he heard only the sound of her breathing and the creak of ice re-forming. He had no concern over attack-the jarls had settled the worst of their squabbles, for the now. In any case, only a fool would risk a raid with the season barely starting to turn.

Snorri set a hand to the smoothness of Freja’s hip. She muttered some sleepy rejection. He pinched.

“Bear?” she asked. Sometimes a white bear would nose around, take a goat. The best thing to do was to let it. His father advised, “Never eat a white bear’s liver.” As a boy, Snorri had asked why, were they poisonous? “Yes,” his father had said, “but the main reason is that if you try to, the bear will be busy eating yours, and he has bigger teeth.”

“Maybe.” Not a bear. Where his surety came from, Snorri didn’t know.

He slid from the furs and the cold gripped him. Clad only in skin, he took down his axe, Hel. His father had given him the weapon, a single broad blade, half-moon cutting edge. “This blade is the start of a journey,” his father had said. “It has sent many men to Hel, and it will send her more souls before its time is done.” With the axe in his hand Snorri felt clothed, the cold laying no finger upon him for fear he might hack it off.

Someone stumbled outside, close by the hut, yet not so close that it left no room for doubt. “That you, Haggerson? Taking a piss on the wrong ground?” Sometimes Haggerson would drink with Magson and Anulf the Ship, then stumble off in search of home-lost even though he had but forty huts to choose from.

A soft but penetrating cry went up, almost the call of a loon, but not quite, and in any case the birds were silent before the ice left. Snorri slipped the latch, set the ball of his foot to the timber, and kicked his door open as hard as he could. Someone howled in pain and staggered back. Snorri barrelled through, into a moonless night pierced by lantern light, more lanterns being unhooded by the moment. Snow lay thick on the ground. It fell in fat and heavy flakes: spring snow, not the tiny crystals of winter. Snorri’s bare feet nearly slid from beneath him, but he kept his balance, swung, and sank his axe into the spine of the man still clutching his face after kissing the door. A savage tug ripped the blade free of the man’s lower back as he collapsed.

“Raid!” Snorri bellowed it. “To arms!”

Lower down the slope, a fire struggled to keep burning on the turf roof of a hut closer to shore. Dark shapes hurried past amidst white flurries, caught in the glow for a moment, then swallowed by the night once more. Foreigners, then: Vikings might set torch to thatch when raiding in warmer climes, but none of them would waste time on that in the North.

Figures converged on Snorri, three rounding the hut, half-running, one tripping over the log stack. Others came up the slope. Smaller, scrawny shapes that made no sense to the eye. Snorri rushed the closest trio. Darkness, flame, and shadow offered little chance to pick out the glimmer of weapons and defend himself. Snorri made no attempt at it, relying instead on the logic that says if you kill your foe immediately you have no need of shield or armour, no need to parry or to evade. He swung, double-handed, arms extended, body turning with the blow. Hel sheared through the first man’s head, hit the second in the shoulder, and buried deep enough to leave his arm swinging on threads. Snorri reversed his turn, feeling but not seeing the hot spray of blood across his shoulders as he spun. The rotation brought him level with the third man, rising with an oath amongst the scattered logs. Snorri’s shin caught the man’s face, his momentum wrenched Hel free, and he brought the axe down, overhead, as he had so many times before in this very spot-a different axe, splitting logs for the fire. The result was much the same.

Something hissed past his ear. Cries and screams went up across Eight Quays now, some terrified, some the terminal sounds men make when wounded beyond repair. He could hear Freja shouting at the children inside the hut, getting them to stand behind her by the stone hearth. Something sharp struck him between the shoulders, not hard, but sharp. He turned, sighting figures atop Hender’s hut, straddling the roof, dislodging the snow to fall in miniature avalanches, some kind of sticks in their hands. . A dart struck him in the shoulder, no longer than his finger. He pulled at it, running for Hender’s doorway, where he would be out of sight from the roof. The dart resisted, its barbs hooked deep in his flesh, and yet there was no pain, just a numbness. Snorri ripped the thing free, careless of the damage.

Hender’s door hung from one leather hinge, men in black rags huddled over something at the far end of the main chamber, hinted at by the glow of a dying fire. The place stank of rot, so bad it made Snorri’s eyes sting, rotten meat and an acrid bog stench. Dark footprints marked the floor around a pool of blood before the hearth.

A roar from behind brought Snorri twisting back to the scene outside. Before Magson’s hut Olaaf Magson laid around him with the broadsword his father won from a Conaught prince. His son, Alrick, beside him with a torch flaring in one hand and a hand-axe in the other. Ragged men pressed in on all sides, weaponless, their flesh sunken, skins stained dark, hair in black ropes. They came forwards, even without hands, even with Alrick’s hand-axe buried in the join between neck and shoulder. A huge figure strode past the melee, wolfskins trailing from his shoulders, double-headed battle-axe in one hand, small iron buckler in the other. Two Vikings kept at his side.

“Broke-Oar.” Snorri breathed the name, pressing back against the log wall. Few men overtopped Snorri and only one was renegade and traitor enough for this night’s work. Though had anyone accused the Broke-Oar of sailing with necromancers Snorri would have laughed at the notion. Until now.

Small darts stood from Olaaf Magson’s neck. Snorri saw them in the torchlight as Alrick went down, grappled by his attackers. Magson tried to lift his sword, arms trembling, then vanished beneath his foes. Snorri reached up between his shoulders and pulled the dart there clear. He had pressed it deeper against the wall and not felt it. Even now a weakness ran through him.

Dead men moved towards the door of Snorri’s hut, stepping frozen-footed through the snow. Between the ver Lutens’ huts a hundred yards upshore, the Broke-Oar and a handful of his men stood with torches raised. Around them mire-ghouls found the rooftops, blowpipes ready.

From the shoreline voices barked orders, their accents strange, clipped like those of Brettan men. The Drowned Isles then, a raid from the Drowned Isles, guided in by Sven Broke-Oar. It made no sense.

The first dead man set his frost-black hands upon Snorri’s door. When Snorri had seen Emy that morning walking with a five-year-old’s lack of guile along the long-quay, he’d known a terror like no other. His child had been, in that moment, out of reach, alone with her danger. It hadn’t been the danger that unmanned him but his inability to stand between it and her.

“Thor. Watch me.” Snorri had never had much time for calling on gods. He might raise a flagon to Odin on feast day, or swear by Hel when they stitched his wounds, but in general he saw them as an ideal, a code to live by, not an ear to moan and complain into. Now, though, he prayed. And launched himself into the corpse-crowd before his door.

As Snorri broke cover he heard nothing above his own battle roar: not the ghouls’ sharp exhalations or the hissing flight of their darts. Even the sting as they punctured his shoulder, arm, and neck he barely noticed. He took the head from the closest of the dead men, the arm that reached for him, a hand, another head. All the time Hel felt heavier in his hands, as if the axe were stone. Even his arms grew heavy, muscles almost unable to bear the weight of the bones they wrapped. A black fist struck him, frostbitten knuckles hammering his temples. Hands caught hold around his knees, some fallen opponent still unable to die despite grievous wounds. Snorri started to fall, toppling to the side. With the last of his strength he launched himself to break the grip around his legs, rolling heels over head along the icy margins of his hut. The invaders pressed on towards the hut’s door in a tight huddle, leaving only the pieces of bodies shorn by his axe and a corpse near-severed at the spine but hauling itself towards him hand over hand.

A numbness ran through Snorri, deep as any that cold will put in a man. He couldn’t feel his limbs, though he saw his arms before him corpse-white and smeared with the dark ichor that lay still in the dead men’s veins. No part of him would move, though every fibre of his will demanded it. Only the sound of door planks splintering shocked his traitor body into rising. An avalanche hammered him back to the ground. Something on the roof of his hut-ghouls, shifting the snow as they scampered into position-and in one mass it fell, pressing him down with a soft but implacable hand.

Snorri lay helpless, the last of his strength gone, his naked body entombed in snow, waiting for death, waiting for the strangling grip of dead hands or the teeth of ghouls or the axe of one of the Broke-Oar’s reavers. No matter what the Broke-Oar was being paid, he would want no witnesses to this night’s shame.

A high shriek reached him, even through his cocoon of snow. Emy! Then Freja’s screams, her battle cry, a mother’s rage, the roar from Karl, his eldest, as he attacked. Every part of his mind howled for motion, every ounce of his will trying to force his arms to reach, legs to pump. . but no piece of him moved. All that anger and desperation, yet only a sigh escaped the numbness of his lips, drooling into the blind white all about him.

• • •

The incessant tapping had woken him. The tap-tap-tap of rain. Rain pouring off the eaves, washing away the snow, taking the ice from his eyelids so he could open them to the day. He turned his head and the water ran from his eyes. The remains of the snow heap lay around him, a touch whiter than the marble of his flesh.

Snow makes a soft bed, but no man wakes from it. That was the wisdom of the North. Snorri had seen enough drunks frozen where they slept to know the truth of it. A groan escaped him. This was death. His dead body would shamble after the corpse legions, his mind trapped within. He had never thought that good men might watch helpless from behind dead eyes, in thrall to necromancers.

Still the water splattered across him, gushing from behind the fascia board, falling in a grey curtain all along the roof’s edge. It beat at his ear, ran across his chest, almost warm though icicles fringed the eaves, defying the thaw. He rolled clear across half-frozen ground. The motion took him by surprise, left him unsure whether he owned it or not.

The raid! As if Snorri’s mind were thawing too, memory began to leak behind his eyes. In a moment he found his feet, rain starting to clean the mud from his side. He stood, unsteady, a tremble running through him, the cold reaching him for the first time. “Gods no!” He stumbled forwards, reaching for the wall for support, though his hands had no more sensation in them than his feet.

The door lay flat, torn off its leather hinges, the interior beyond strewn with bed furs, broken pots, scattered corn. Snorri staggered in, searching through the furs with blunt fingers, seized by a shivering beyond his control, tossing the bedding aside, dreading to find nothing, dreading to find something.

In the end he discovered only a pool of blood on the hearthstone, dark and sticky and smeared by feet. Against the whiteness of his fingers the blood regained its crimson vitality. Whose blood? How much spilled? Nothing left of his wife, of his children, but blood? At the door, a clump of red hair caught his attention, snagged by a crack in the support, made to dance by the wind. “Egil.” Snorri reached for his son’s hair with bloodstained hands. Convulsions overtook him and he fell back, thrashing and trembling amongst the hides of grey wolf and black bear.

How many hours it took for the ghouls’ poison to leave him, Snorri could not have said. The venom that had preserved him in the snow, slowing his heart and drawing back life into the tightest core, now restored all sensation as it left his system. It put an edge on each of the senses, heightening the pain of returning circulation, making a misery of the cold despite being wrapped with many furs, even putting fresh barbs on a grief that already seemed beyond enduring. He raged and he shook and by slow degrees both warmth and strength returned to his limbs. He dressed, tying laces with still-numb fingers in an ecstasy of fumbling, pulled his boots on, crammed the last of the winter stores into his travel pack, dry hake and black biscuit, salt in a wrap of sealskin, fat in an earthenware jar. He took his travelling skins, seal in two layers, trapping the down of the cliff gull. Above it he wore a wolfskin, a grey beast that like the dark bears travel north with the summer and retreat before the snows. It would be enough. Spring had won her war, and like the summer wolf Snorri would strike north and take what he needed.

“I will find you,” he promised the empty room, promised the dent in the bed where his wife had slept, promised the roof above them, the sky above it, the gods on high.

And ducking the lintel, Snorri ver Snagason left his home to find his axe amidst the thaw.

• • •

“And did you find it?” I asked, imagining his father’s axe lying there in the melting snow, and Snorri lifting it with awful purpose.

“Not first.” The Norseman’s voice put so much despair into just two words I couldn’t ask him to speak more and held my peace, but a moment later he spoke on unprompted.

“I found Emy first. Discarded on a midden heap, limp and ragged, like a lost doll.” No sound but for the crackle of the fire beside us. I wanted him to keep silent, to say nothing more. “The ghouls had eaten most of her face. She still had eyes, though.”

“I’m so sorry.” And I was. Snorri’s magic had reached into me again and made me brave. In that moment I wanted to be the one to stand between the child and her attackers. To keep her safe. And failing that, to hunt them to the ends of the earth. “Death must have been a kindness.”

“She wasn’t dead.” No emotion in his voice now. None. And the night felt thick around us, the dark deepening into blindness, swallowing stars. “I pulled two ghoul-darts from her and she started to scream.” He lay down and the fire dimmed as if choked by its own smoke, though it had burned clean enough when set. “Death was kind.” He drew a sharp breath. “But no father should have to give such a kindness to his child.”

I lay down too, no care for the hard ground, damp cloak, empty stomach. A tear made its way along the side of my nose. Snorri’s magic had left me. My only desire lay south, back in the comforts of the Red Queen’s palace. An echo of his misery rang in me and confused itself with my own. That tear might have been for little Emy-it might have been for me-it probably was for me, but I’ll tell myself it was for both of us, and perhaps one day I’ll believe it.